You never really know why anybody does anything. We stole things in those days, but there was no reason to steal. It wasn’t for lack of money and it wasn’t for lack of anything to do: If you didn’t have anything to do in New York City back then, whose fault was it but your own? But we stole, and to this day for the life of me I cannot figure out why.
It started the time we were in that Army-Navy store just off Times Square… I think the place was called Richard’s. (This was when Times Square was still Times Square, not a breakaway republic of Orlando, Florida.) We were in our mid-teens and I was there to buy a knapsack because India and I were going up to the Adirondacks to camp out and commune with the mountains, the sky, the green grass and the sparkling asphalt of the Taconic State Parkway. Jody, Michael and I were just browsing around, getting funny looks from everybody inside. Our hair was on the long side already, particularly Jody’s, and the guys working there had crewcuts and sported plaid shirts, workboots, baggy dungarees. Dozens of keys on chains dangling from the waist. (Always a bad sign. The more keys, the worse.) Jody found a few long coats on a rack near the dressing room, trenchcoats from God knows which war — it could have been anything from the Thirty Years to the Boer to the Korean. The coats were three sizes too big for us and there were brownish stains on them here and there… somebody’s homesickness-inducing lunch or their blood. That moldy wet wool smell even though they hadn’t been wet for years. Jody put his hands into the deep pockets and you could almost see the cartoon light bulb flicking on just over his head.
“Holes!” he whispered.
All the trenchcoats had holes in the pockets that led right into the lining. A shoplifter’s wetdream. Perfect for stealing stuff, if you didn’t get too unreasonable, like trying to swipe a kitchen range or a Volkswagen. So we bought the coats. Back then they couldn’t have cost more than ten dollars each.
No, I remember now, we didn’t buy them. We only bought one. Jody, the hairiest and the tallest of the three of us, put on the biggest coat and wore the two others beneath that one. He plunked down the money — did we call it “scratch” then or was it “bread”? — and we calmly left the place. My knapsack was inside one of the coats too, but India and I never did make it up to the Adirondacks. Our plan, hatched after four full glasses each of Gallo wine pinched from her old man’s liquor cabinet, was to hitchhike, but after standing on the West Side Highway for only ten minutes with our thumbs barely out, we gave up and probably spent the weekend watching TV at her parents’ place, which was dryer, had fewer insects and was a lot more comfortable.
But we didn’t have to steal. My father was a psychotherapist and probably would have conjectured in his snide Freudian, Ivy League way that we stole because we “subconsciously wanted to get caught.” Well, the three of us must have been incredibly incompetent in our collective subconscious because never once did we get caught. The things we stole were small things and wouldn’t have landed us an interview at a reformatory: Pepperidge Farm cookies, beer, beef jerky, baseball cards, Kraft American cheese. And books, tons of books: Grove Press really should have hired a posse to hunt us down, we stole so much of their issue, and for years I’ve lived every day of my life expecting to hear from the enraged estates of William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Alain Robbes-Grillet, Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. With infallible bar codes and foolproof computer inventories, with video surveillance systems sniffing out your every breath, it seems almost as impossible to steal a book nowadays as it is to sell one.
We even stole Twinkies. Twinkies! Our parents were well off, we usually worked summer jobs and got allowances and surely could have afforded them. Maybe we stole them only because we could: they were just there, ripe for the plucking, begging to be lifted.
I remember, after we pinched a whole box of Twinkies one night, Jody saying, “Man, sometimes stealing is so easy that it’s practically criminal!”
But you never know why a person does something. Did India truly believe we were going up to the Adirondacks that weekend? Did I? Neither of us had ever hitched before. I knew I didn’t actually want to go up there and she probably knew she didn’t want to, but still we planned on it. Both of us hoping to God that no car would stop for us. To be honest, neither of us was ever so into Nature that we wanted to commune with it or even spend much time inside it. Nature seemed boring, too permanent and annoying, and never what it was cracked up to be by hippies and poets and the likes of the Lake Poets and Rachel Carson. City kids to our concrete cores, mountains and sky didn’t mean that much to us and so we wound up watching “Bonanza” or Ed Sullivan and helping each other with algebra.
A few months after our non-Adirondack getaway there was something like a be-in in Central Park. Or maybe it was a happening or a love-in… I never could figure out the difference. It was in Sheep Meadow, and dope, incense and patchouli were all around. The whole place was crawling with dazed and dazzling longhairs, aging beatniks, Sylvia Plath-worshipping poetesses, pussy bandits on the prowl, and malcontents. It was spring and the grass was green and the sky was clear and bright. Or maybe that’s just memory colorizing it for me after all these years. India and I entered the park from the West Side on 72nd Street and saw people passing out buttons, leaflets, fliers, etc…. the usual paraphernalia. Anti-war shit, legalize pot shit, impeach Johnson shit, Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh/NLF is gonna win, buttons that read “Kafka was a kvetch” and “Proust was a yenta” (neither of which I fully understood). We walked deeper into the park and who do I see but Jody and Michael passing out material too.
“What could they be handing out?” India asked me.
“No idea,” I said. “Maybe they got political over the weekend?”
“But that would mean them committing to something.”
From twenty yards away I saw people taking Jody and Mikey’s fliers and examining them, turning them around, shaking their heads. They looked baffled. So we walked over and Jody winked at us and handed me a piece of paper. I looked at it and it was blank. I turned it over and the other side was blank too. Not a word or a photo or a doodle or anything. They were passing out blank pieces of paper, stoned out of their ever-loving minds.
Part Two
The first time I smoked dope it was with Jody Wolfe and it was his first time too. Jody and I were the same age; Michael, his cousin, was almost a year younger. Jody had bought the weed on 72nd Street and Broadway in the shadow of the Central Savings Bank, a barred stone structure that resembled a medieval fortress; he’d bought a dime bag from a stocky horsefiend named Angel or Angela or Angelique. With razorblades in her butch oiled-up hair and a pack of Kools curled up into the shoulder of her stained white T-shirt, she could have easily passed for a very tough greaser guy. Jody and I couldn’t scare up rolling papers anywhere; we went into cigar stores and head shops but nobody would sell us any…we were too young for rolling papers, we were told. So Jody bought cigarettes (cigarettes, they would sell us!), and, sitting on a park bench on a chilly October Saturday, we hollowed out a lucky Chesterfield and filled it up with the pot. We handled the cannabis gingerly, as if it was a very potent batch of nitroglycerine, and took our lumpy reefer up to the roof of his parents’ apartment building. Now it was night and chilly and up there you could see all the red and blue lights of Broadway twinkling, the crawl of traffic and the trees of Central Park, the Hudson River and the silhouette of the doomed roller coaster crowning the New Jersey Palisades.
We passed the joint around, finished it and nothing happened.
“Nothing is supposed to happen the first time,” Jody said. “That’s what I’ve heard.”
“So why are we doing this?” I asked.
“For the second time, I guess,” he said.
We didn’t even get mildly sleepy. We went to a bodega on Amsterdam Avenue and stole a few cans of Rheingold, thinking that it might help, but nothing happened other than the beer buzz.
“So, uh, when will the second time be?” I asked. We were back on the roof.
“What are you doing tomorrow morning, Cosmo?” he asked.
I met Jody the next day at around noon. Sunday mornings were always boring, nothing but cartoons on, or swashbuckling and Steve Reeves’ “Hercules” movies on Channel 9, and then bowling, golf and football. One long yawn until Monday morning’s unkind shove awake.
We went into Central Park and sat down on a park bench. Autumn leaves swirled at our feet and long dark clouds sagged in the sky.
Jody lit up Joint Number Two with a Zippo and said, “Keep an eye out for the fuzz.”
This time it worked. We were high and the leaves crashed into us and floated right by our eyes almost in slow motion. Bundled-up people walked by and we were laughing at them, making fun of everything and everybody: all the men looked like they belonged in the movie “M” or “All Through the Night.” One guy walked by and all Jody had to say was, “Hey, it’s Gloves Donahue!” and I knew what he was talking about. Channel 5 had just shown the movie the week before.
“Now I see what all the fuss is about,” he said. “This feels pretty good.”
“It sure does,” I said.
The breeze was blowing the smoke away from us, into the bare trees and grass-less earth.
“Uh-oh,” he said, grabbing my jacket collar, “we’re hooked! Hooked, I tell you!”
We walked uptown in the park to that pond where boys and their fathers set out toy sailboats. Some of the kids that day had small dinky ones but there were the more expensive boats, three or four feet high with several sails, straight out of Horatio Hornblower if Horatio Hornblower had been the size of a sewing needle. It was windy and the boats darted around and skimmed across the choppy mud-brown water, almost on their sides. The kids leaned over with clenched fists and were transfixed, smiling, intent, so full of hope and curiosity. Jody began pretending it was a horse race and was doing his Fred Capossela imitation: “It is now post time…and they’re off!” If I remember it right, every boat on that gusty day sank like a stone, and some kids began crying and their dads had to comfort them. The boats dipped into the water, the sails got soaked, then they went down to the bottom. But Jody kept doing his race call: “And the Titanic sticks its bow in front…now the Lusitania is behind by two lengths and it’s four lengths back to the Andrea Doria…but OH NO! The Titanic is sinking! The Titanic is sinking! Oh, the humanity!”
Some of the fathers heard that and didn’t appreciate it. After all, they had bought the boats to begin with (at hobby shops, in the days — before PlayStations and Xboxes — when there were such things) and their sons were crushed and on the verge of tears.
A tall mustachioed dad — Brian Donleavy would have played him in the movie — grabbed Jody by the arm and snapped, “Will you shut up?!” Jody, still pretty high, said to him in a dreamy voice, “I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky. And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” The man, the red feather in his fedora quivering with both his anger and the breeze, didn’t know just what to make of that so he let Jody go. Defense by bewilderment.
We walked over to the other side of the park, the eastern side, and smoked some more. All the world thought we were smoking a Chesterfield and Jody said to me: “Tomorrow I’m going to City Hall and changing my name legally to Chester Fields.” (For the next few weeks I called him Chet or Chester.) We only smoked half of it because we didn’t want to get too stoned and because now we were running out. Also, I was going over to India’s house and her parents already weren’t too crazy about me (her older sister had once asked me perfectly seriously, “So how come you killed my lord?”); curling up on their dining room table and falling asleep wasn’t going to endear me any further. Jody was going over to Gracie Stern’s, his quasi-girlfriend at that time, or to Michael’s to watch football. He hadn’t met Gwen yet.
Part Three
Gwen was from Lincoln, Nebraska. She had smooth olive skin — maybe a tiny zit now and then — and a pretty face and as curly a head of hair as I’ve ever seen. Her father worked in banking and had gotten transferred to New York, probably a promotion. They lived on the East Side in the 70s between Lexington and Third Avenue, which was and still is a pretty dead area. “Desolation Row” we used to call it. Michael, Jody and I were all West Siders — born and raised — and there was something different about the East Side, something you couldn’t quite understand, appreciate or like. On the East Side it was possible to walk three miles without seeing one newsstand. On the West Side there was a newsstand every five blocks. The East Side had no character. Nor did it have egg creams, pretzels, pizza parlors, movie theaters showing old movies or current foreign movies, bookshops, ethnic food, and the stuff of what was then real life. It was a North Korea all unto itself.
“There’s just nothing there,” Michael once lamented a la Gertrude Stein, “not even the stuff that’s there.”
I was sitting next to Jody in school on Gwen’s first day. There were only a few weeks left in the school year and so it must have been Spring. Lou Altobianco, our five-foot-four-tall history teacher, introduced her. Nobody had noticed her there until that moment; she’d been sitting silently toward the back of the room on the aisle near a window. (Not getting noticed was an accomplishment: there were never more than fifteen kids to a class.) “This is Gwen,” Little Louie said, “and she’ll be joining us as of today.” He signaled for her to stand up.
She rolled her eyes a little and smiled and reluctantly stood.
“Is it Gwen or Gwendolyn?” Lou asked.
“It’s Gwendolyn,” she said with a shrug, “only if you’re mad at me for something.” Her hands were trembling but her voice was steady. She was, I’m guessing, sixteen years old.
“Well, I hope we won’t be mad at you ever.”
“I hope so too.”
She sat back down and Lou returned to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the various causes of World War I. When I looked over to Jody I could tell he was fascinated, but not with the fate of the Hapsburgs.
Gwen was shy. Probably because she was from out of town and didn’t know anyone. Our school was very small, only two-hundred or so students, and you were always running into each other and she was by herself a lot at first. But people were talking about her; if you were new you were always talked about, until somebody newer came along. It was terrifying in a way but kids that age are too ignorant to be terrified, which explains the existence of proms, gang wars, fraternity hazing, drivers ed, college football, debutante balls and military conscription. Her hair was the color of the leaves that were swirling around that day in Central Park, copper with hints of burgundy and honey. Her eyes were hazel and she had a long graceful neck and was quite slim. For the next few days Jody, India and I would see her in a class or in the hall or right outside the school: she’d be holding her books or reading in a corner or eating a sandwich. Almost always alone and looking as if she wanted to be left that way.
“You’re interested, aren’t you?” I asked Jody.
“I won’t admit it,” he said, “but I’m not going to deny it.”
She was studying the bassoon and you often saw her lugging around a bassoon case, which may have weighed more than she did. We didn’t yet know it was a bassoon case and one time — were they the first words he ever said to her? — Jody asked her, “So why do you always walk around with a swan locked up in a box and when are you going to let it out?”
We set up this thing called “Gwen Sightings” and gave code names to different areas of the school — it was a game of Battleship with the school as the grid. The lunchroom was Sector One, bathrooms were Checkpoint Charlie, the chem lab was Madame Curie, the two stairways were Grand Central and Penn Station, et cetera. So if I walked up to Jody and said, “Gwen Sighting, Checkpoint Charlie, third floor,” he knew just what I meant.
I’d never known Jody to be shy up to then. Well, in a way he was shy but he deftly covered it up with a show of bravado. I think by doing that he managed to convince himself he wasn’t shy. (Defense by bewilderment again although this time it was himself he was bewildering.) So at first he had trouble approaching her. India noticed it, so did I. Once in a while, as Gwen began to fit in to her new surroundings, he would find himself in conversations with her but he could never purposely seek her out. “No nuts,” he’d moan to me. “I’m basically a eunuch.” We were teens and our experience with girls wasn’t exactly vast, particularly mine. India, whose real name was Theresa, was my first true girlfriend. Jody had fooled around more than most people his age, but Gwen had him stymied. He first confessed this to India after she swore on her mother’s life that she’d never tell anyone (she told me less than ten minutes later). His mouth even got dry when he spoke to her.
(“I just made a serious fool of myself,” he said once after about ten of us, including Gwen, had eaten lunch together one day. “No, you didn’t,” I said. But in a way he had because he’d been the only one present to not utter a word. But that silence of his was the blaring, obvious signal he was sending out.)
Our high school was, to put it mildly, “different.” Michael went to a public high school, a very competitive one called Peter Minuit High School, which was only a few blocks away. If you attended Minuit you had to wear a blazer and a tie and keep your shirt tucked in. Well, I didn’t feel like wearing a blazer and a tie and keeping my shirt tucked in and neither did Jody so we went to the Eleanor Roosevelt School. It was a private high school and it cost our folks a chunk of money although by today’s standards the tuition would seem free. It was okay to smoke cigarettes inside the school (I didn’t) and call teachers by their first names (I most certainly did). Everything was lax, skipping class and not doing homework wasn’t a big problem, and I admit it: I didn’t learn too much there — telltale chasms in my education still reveal themselves to this day — but I’m glad I went. Eleanor Roosevelt students were laughingstocks to kids at other New York schools, who said that E.R. stood for the Emergency Room or the Emotionally Retarded. In light of the former nickname, E.R. students were called “basket cases” but we retaliated by making baskets our school mascot and the name of our incredibly feeble school teams. Yes, we were the Basket Cases! Jody insisted that every city kid really wanted to go to Eleanor Roosevelt; it was just a question of if their parents were gullible enough to send them or not. But some incredibly bright — albeit slightly demented — kids attended there, kids like Robbie Evans, Warren Heyman, Julie and Janie James, Manny Shaw, and a weirdo everyone called Felix the Cat. There were worse schools out there. There was this one outfit in the West 50s that you never even had to go to except one day at the beginning to prove you were attending, one day at the end to take finals, and one day in the middle to prove you were still alive. And there was this other school that didn’t even have a building or an address; the rumor was that there were no teachers either and only about ten students. Those two schools may have been urban legends but somehow they were three or four times as expensive to go to as ours. So in the long run, E.R. really wasn’t so bad, although I have no idea who Robespierre and Danton were, what the Monroe Doctrine is, and what Avogadro’s Number is all about.
Jody could have gone to Bronx Science, Peter Stuyvesant, Peter Minuit, or Horace Mann, which might be the best schools in the city, but decided not to. I was accepted at Minuit but didn’t want any part of it. A necktie for me was almost as bad as a noose. Maybe we didn’t get what we deserved but we got what we wanted.
E.R., which was located on West 4th Street in the heart of Greenwich Village, didn’t have a real cafeteria — there was just a room with tables and chairs and a soda machine and a GE toaster oven that, for some reason, everyone called Chico — and you could eat any time you wanted (or nap; usually someone was sleeping in a corner in there). When the weather was good a bunch of us would go eat our lunches on a stoop or in Washington Square Park, only a few blocks away. We’d get sandwiches at delis or pizza or buy hot dogs from a Sabrett stand. In her first weeks at E.R. Gwen would eat either in the lunchroom or someplace else unknown to us. If she wasn’t with us Jody would always mutter to me, “Where do you think she is?” But if she was with us, he was usually silently and nervously hovering around.
We would talk about the usual things: music, TV, movies, other kids. Now, Jody was normally the most talkative guy around, to the point where he was told to shut up every now and then, but everybody noticed that when Gwen was around, he wasn’t saying much. He had sworn me to secrecy about his crush but I think even Juan the custodian and the legions of school mice knew about it. Jody told Michael too, of course: they weren’t just cousins, they were best friends and were so close that you forgot they were cousins. One time — Gwen had only been at E.R. for two weeks — Michael zipped over after school just to check Gwen out. We were downstairs, about to go to the park, and there was Michael in his prep boy blue blazer looking completely out of place among all of us scruffy misfits in our blue jeans, Chuck Taylors and t-shirts.
“What’s Mikey doing here?” I asked Jody.
“He wants to meet Gwen,” Jody said.
“He wants to meet her or you want him to meet her?”
He answered with a shrug and a smirk.
But Gwen wasn’t around. She must been taking a bassoon lesson. We sat on benches in the park and I was talking and Michael was talking and Jody sat there cursing his fate.
Part Four
After that first time getting high, we began smoking pot regularly, if you consider four times a week regularly. Sometimes it was four times a week, sometimes not at all; it depended on how much money we had and how available it was. Angela or Angelique proved an unreliable dealer: it wasn’t unusual for us to give her ten dollars for a dime bag and then have her vanish on us for two weeks. (“What did you do with our bread?” Jody asked after one such disappearance. “I took it to jail wit’ me is what I done with it, fuckhead!” she snapped. She wasn’t just unreliable, she could get difficult too.) We bought from some weird people: a demented Korean War vet who slept in the park and wore sunglasses only at night, a transvestite whore named Frankie who swore he’d once serviced Nelson Rockefeller and gotten $500 for his efforts, and one of Mikey’s doormen’s sons. In the very beginning, Michael refrained: it wasn’t that he was afraid he was going to start robbing candy stores or raping preteen girls; he just wanted to see what it did to us. When we didn’t grow new arms and our teeth didn’t fall out, he joined the fun.
A few older kids, mostly seniors, in the school were dealing but they were weren’t much more reliable than Angelique.
One day a senior at E.R. named Scotty Albright told Jody he would lay him on to a free ounce if he did him some favors. Jody jumped at the chance. An ounce! We’d never bought ounces, only paltry nickel or dime bags. An ounce would keep us happy for a long time. But the favor was that Jody had to be Scotty’s bagman, the delivery guy, for a few weeks. He had no idea just how booming Scotty Albright’s business was so he agreed. Scotty wore his father’s cast-off Turnbull & Asser and Thomas Pink pinstriped shirts and used Vitalis to keep his hair slicked back and perfect, but he could do nothing about the typhoon of zits constantly ravaging his cheeks, forehead and chin. He had long sideburns and even they had zits. It turned out that Scotty was something like a Junior Achievement prodigy, a millionaire entrepreneur in training, and Jody wound up going to all corners of the city, carrying dozens of pounds of pot. I would see him on these runs and he looked like he had gained thirty pounds. But the new flabby lumps were rolled up plastic bags taped to his shoulders, chest, knees, calves and around his back. “I look,” he said, “like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, don’t I?” He sure did. In the role of Scotty’s courier, Jody went to the Lower East Side, Chelsea, all over the West Side, Brooklyn Heights, anywhere. He’d ring a doorbell, go upstairs, hand over the pot, and the customer would fork over the dough. “I’m walking around with over a thousand dollars, Cosmo,” he told me one night over the phone, “and all I’m getting is one ounce for this?!” Another thing that pissed him off was that he was told to take subways and buses, never taxis. It didn’t take long before he was referring to Scotty, his benefactor, as “that cheap fuck.”
Some strange things would happen to him on these runs. One night he delivered a half-ounce to a blonde housewife named Dusty Bamberger on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. “She’s not beautiful,” Jody told me. “She’s not pretty. But she’s okay.” The husband worked in the fur business and was out of town the night he went over. Jody and Dusty effected the transaction quickly and she politely asked him in. She had a small pipe and they smoked a few bowls. She was in her thirties and had lousy taste in music… she put on the dulcet song stylings of Jack Jones or Johnny Mathis or somebody, and all the time Jody knew he had to get going: he still had five or six other places to go for Scotty Albright. But Dusty, whose walk-in closet tumbled over with mink, silver fox and ermine, wouldn’t let him go.
“Do you feel like dancing maybe?” she asked him.
“I don’t dance to this kind of music to be honest,” he said.
“It’s easy. Just watch me.”
She stood up and held her freckled arms out.
“This really isn’t my kind of music,” he reiterated.
“Well, what is your kind of music?”
He knew she wouldn’t have any of it so he didn’t say anything.
“Come on,” she said. “Dance with Dusty. Do you do the watusi? The swim? The Alley Cat?”
“I won a twist contest once. But that was years ago.”
“Come on. Dance.”
When he didn’t dance, she worked the guilt trip routine. “Why don’t you want to dance with me?” she whined. “What’s so wrong with me? What, I’m ugly?”
He stood up and while he was looking out the window trying to think of a polite means of escape, Dusty dimmed the lights inside. He walked over to her and she took his hands and pulled him close. They danced and moved stiffly in tight circles.
“You gotta relax! It’s no good unless you relax!” Dusty Bamberger said. But she was ordering him, not requesting, and ordering is seldom conducive to dancing, relaxation or seduction.
She started playing with his hair. Jody stood six-foot-one and had long straight brown hair, which just past made it to the shoulders at that time. “Such nice hair,” she said. She moved in closer. They kept dancing and she kept playing with his hair. Jody had a huge boner… knowing sixteen year old boys, since I used to be one, he probably had one the second she’d answered the door. It didn’t matter that Dusty wasn’t beautiful. A soft breeze blows the wrong way, or the bus hits a pothole, or the subway doors open, or someone drops a toothpick, and all of a sudden you’ve got an unmeltable hard-on.
“Kiss me,” she said. “Come on. Pucker up.”
“I dunno,” Jody said.
Then came the guilt again. “Why won’t you kiss me? What’s so wrong with me that you won’t kiss me?”
She pressed her round Brooklyn Heights breasts as hard as she could against him.
“Okay,” he said, “Jody will kiss Dusty.”
He kissed Dusty. She started clutching his non-existent ass and he started playing with her fully extant boobs but meanwhile he had to be on Riverside Drive and 73rd Street because some lawyer was expecting a half an ounce any minute. She began taking her clothes off and rolls of Dusty the Furrier’s Wife’s flesh spilled in every direction. She quickly took his clothes off, Jody never making a move to stop her, and the pot fell all over the floor: the carpet was covered with Baggies, buds, seeds and leaves. Jody stood there, twenty pieces of masking tape clinging to or dangling off his body, and surveyed both the wreckage and Dusty’s body.
“Come on. Love me up. Put this inside Dusty,” she said grabbing onto him.
“Okay,” he agreed.
He gave Dusty what she wanted. But because he was under the gun he came a second later on purpose and then immediately afterwards began gathering up all the spilled weed.
“Jesus Christ,” Dusty said cleaning the sperm off her pouting stomach. “Jesus Christ.”
“I’m only a teenager!” Jody said to her. “What did you expect?!”
He gathered up all the pot, put his clothes on and left.
Part Five
Celebrate the second anniversary of FiveChapters on Wednesday, October 15, when Jay McInerney, Kate Christensen and Arthur Phillips will read from their stories first published here. The party’s free and starts at 7: 30 p.m. at Union Hall in Brooklyn, 702 Union Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues in Park Slope.
Some of Scotty Albright’s customers got pissed off at Jody for the pot not being that good. Usually the stuff wasn’t terrific and, in our first year of headdom, nobody could come close to matching the quality of the pot that Angel or Angelique got us. “Hey, I don’t grow the stuff,” Jody would tell his dissatisfied customers. “I’m just the delivery guy.”
One night he thought some big black dude named Rufus Hayes was going to kill him. This was in Rufus’s apartment on Amsterdam Avenue in the 90s. A poker game was underway and money, cigarettes, jewelry, plastic chips and a revolver were on the small round living room table.
Rufus weighed the stuff out on a small rinky-dink scale. Just making sure.
“That was supposed to be two pound, man,” Rufus said. “It’s short.”
“It is two pounds, Rufus,” Jody said. “Maybe your scale’s rigged.”
“Hey, I tried to rig this scale but I couldn’t!”
Rufus Hayes was six-foot-four and that didn’t count the foot-high afro. The other guys playing poker, decked out in crimson velvet and polyester Clyde regalia, were equally nefarious-looking, and the gun on the table, Jody conjectured, was probably not the only firearm on the premises.
“Scotty weighs ‘em out, I don’t,” Jody told Rufus.
“Shit, the plastic bag it’s in probably weighs a pound by itself,” one of the other poker players said.
Rufus rolled a joint — with one hand, Jody told me admiringly — and he and the brothers smoked it. “This is kitty litter,” Rufus said with a scowl. “I’m not payin’ for this.”
Jody stood there, still looking as lumpy as a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon, waiting to get the unused portion of the two pounds back. But for Underdog it wasn’t coming.
“So you’re not gonna pay, Rufus?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I simply don’t want to.”
“Then can I get it back?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I said, I simply don’t want to.”
By this time Rufus had sat back down and another hand of poker was being dealt. Despite it being kitty litter everybody was smoking the stuff. Jody took a few hits and said, “This pot is fine. So can we cut the Bartleby the Scrivener routine now?”
“No,” Rufus said.
“Rufus,” Jody warned, “Scotty’s gonna be real mad at you for this.”
Rufus and the other brothers cracked up, nearly fell off their chairs. They couldn’t stop laughing. Scotty Albright was eighteen years old, had bad acne and wore Hush Puppies, and these guys packed heaters and drove Cadillacs.
“You tell Scotty,” one of them said, “we shittin’ apple sauce over here.”
Unless you count Dusty on the carpet in her living room, nobody ever tipped Jody. All he had to look forward to was the free ounce when his bagman days were through.
But there was no ounce. What Jody had delivered wasn’t just the end of Scotty Albright’s pot, it was the end of his dealing career too. “I’ve had a change of heart,” he told Jody one day in the E.R. lunchroom. “I’m getting straight. I have been admitted to Duke after all.”
“But what about me?!” Jody asked. “I haven’t been admitted to Duke!”
“What about you?” Scotty Albright said. Jody wanted to take his slice of pizza and smear it in Scotty Albright’s big head, which looked like a pizza pie anyway.
“The ounce! That’s what you promised me. You’re not going to pay me?”
“No. I’m not. But think of it this way: you learned a valuable lesson, didn’t you? Don’t ever trust anyone when it comes to conducting business. Always go into a venture suspicious, always seek out the facts first.”
He told Jody that one day he’d be thankful.
But the Wolfeman had the last laugh. That night he called up Rufus and said, “Hey, you know that grass I delivered a few nights ago? There was this special kind of chemical in it, I found out. It’s some kind of secret FBI program against radical Negroes to make them impotent and less uppity or something. I just wanted to warn you guys so if anything happens, you’ll know what’s up.”
Scotty Albright didn’t come into school for a while. He also wound up missing his graduation ceremony. He had broken his nose, we heard, running into a brick wall.
